


World's End

by dankassspaceweed



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Post-Episode: s07e04 Millenium
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-28
Updated: 2017-06-28
Packaged: 2018-11-20 12:18:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11335497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dankassspaceweed/pseuds/dankassspaceweed
Summary: /“Did I not receive your holiday pleasantry with the appropriate fanfare, then?”It feels like a kick in the balls. “My holiday pleasantry?"/The world didn't end, but maybe Scully wanted it to.





	1. Chapter 1

She gives him this bashful smile. It’s a question. _Was that what I think it was? Or is it just New Year’s Eve, and I’m the one standing next to you?_

 _Oh, Scully,_ he thinks. As if it could ever have been anyone else.

As if anyone else has ever stood next to him, let alone with such loyalty, for so many years. He went to the end of the world for her. He’d do it again tomorrow. Now that he’s kissed her he never wants to stop, but he’s afraid the next time he does it—and based on the dreamy look that clouds her eyes, he thinks there’s gonna be a next time—that he won’t be able to hold himself back, keep himself in check. Maybe he will finally ask her to give him too much, and she’ll leave.

But he’s not going to let that happen. In fact, he’s _sure_ it’s not going to happen. Because for seven years he’s feared that as soon as he made a move, she’d run. That she’d be afraid, she might not feel the same, and he would never be able to make himself unfeel it. But then their eyes had met and her pupils were shiny and dark under the fluorescent lights in the hospital waiting room. The gashes on her neck looked worse up close, and he'd wanted to take her home to the warm steam of his bathroom—hers, better yet—and clean them up with a washcloth. And put her to bed. And hold her forever, holy shit, he could hold her forever.

Music from the TV had turned them both pliant. In response to the soundtrack of many drunken kisses, they had been Pavlov’s dogs, suddenly sleepy and slow, pressed closer by the inertia of holiday tradition.

He’d thought, for an ancient song, it took a long time for Auld Lang Syne to get recorded on paper. Nobody wrote it down until 1788, his brain supplies, but it was real long before then.

He knows: some things are real before they happen.

He knows about “for old times’ sake,” and the preservation of friendship through memory. He remembers almost kissing her in his hallway. He remembers breathing on the bug-bitten skin of her lower back, his eyes locked on the waistband of her cotton panties. He remembers her back to 1939 and across the world to Antarctica and deep into the ground and in a corn field in Texas, screaming his name, asleep on his couch, shooting him in the shoulder. A thousand roadside diner _oh-is-that-your-foot-I’m-touching-Mulder?-I-thought-it-was-the-table_ s, basement campout _sorry-I-brushed-your-breast-with-my-arm-as-I-reached-for-that-file-Scully_ s.

And then: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. _Happy New Year._ He’d kissed her.

And she’s smiling shyly.

What bowls him over: there are so many iterations of her, and even this one, though rare, he recognizes.

“The world didn’t end,” he says.

“No,” she answers. “It didn’t.”

He watches the moony smile leave her eyes. She looks at her shoes, then straight ahead. He feels suddenly cold, like once again they are parallel lines. His confidence fades though he’s unsure what he’s done wrong.

“Happy New Year, Scully,” he mumbles. He feels the distance between them growing and growing and it chokes him quiet, holds him still. She doesn’t look at him.

“Happy New Year, Mulder,” she mumbles back.

While she doesn’t seem entirely distraught, this is not the Scully he kissed moments ago. That was Joy to the World, baseball Scully. This is _put-on-a-face-mask-in-Arcadia-so-you-sleep-on-the-couch_ Scully. _My-kid’s-dying-but-leave-me-alone_ Scully. _I-wanna-get-out-of-the-car_ , silently disappointed, secretly resentful Scully.

He drapes his good arm around her shoulders and squeezes as they leave the waiting room, but she doesn’t squeeze him back.


	2. Chapter 2

He can’t hold his tongue for very long. After, all Fox Mulder is nothing if not a glutton for punishment. 

“Are you mad at me?” 

She turns, sharply, to look at him and the car swerves. She coughs, realigning them in the right lane. She’s driving them home and he is in her passenger seat feeling sorry for himself. 

“No, Mulder,” she sighs. “I’m not mad at you.”

“Then why are you acting this way?” 

“I’m not acting any way, Mulder.”

“Yes you are,” he accuses. Yes she is and she fucking knows it, and he knows she knows it, and suddenly he’s mad. “Should I not have done it?!” he demands, too loudly, and she rolls her eyes. 

“Don’t you dare roll your eyes,” he seethes. 

“Mulder, calm down,” she tells him, plaintive. “It’s fine.”

He sinks down further into his seat, stubborn and childlike. He feels naked. He has never felt too vulnerable with her, he has never felt overexposed. He'd told her about Samantha that first night. He’d told her everything, and now, now is the time he feels embarrassed. He can shamelessly pitch the validity of some Mexican goat sucker, teen vampire, sea monster thing but when it comes to pitching himself—it’s too risky. He can’t even bring himself to convince her: _but we’re good together, and I love you, and the world didn’t end._  

“I wanted it to be better than fine,” he says finally.

She looks at him for a long moment. 

“Keep your eyes on the road,” he says to be mean.

She scoffs and pulls the car to a screeching stop on the shoulder. 

“Are you fucking serious right now?” she asks, madder than he is at lightening speed. 

He’s confused. “I—what…?”

“You kissed me on New Year’s, Mulder. Congratulations. Nothing has to be different. Trust me, you’ve made that clear.”

“What?”

“What the hell is your problem, Mulder?” She props her elbow on the steering wheel and leans her head against her hand, rubbing her temples. Then she looks up at him, defeated, and much quieter. “What do you want from me?”

“Scully, I… what do you mean _what do I want from you_?” _Isn’t it obvious?_

Her voice is pointed again. “Did I not receive your holiday pleasantry with the appropriate fanfare, then?” 

It feels like a kick in the balls. “My holiday pleasantry?”

“Could you stop repeating me, please?”

“Is that what you think that was?” Her eyes unlock from his immediately, landing in her lap. She studies her fingernails, picks a cuticle with her thumb.

“A holiday pleasantry, Scully?"

She swallows and shrugs. 

He sees scared Scully, _Salt-Lake-City-Utah_ Scully, _almost-kissed-your-clone-on-my-couch_ Scully, the Scully of yore who looked up at him from her deathbed, eyes wide and confused, _why are you here, Mulder, don’t you have somewhere better to be?_ Young Scully, asking him to help untie her wrists, because Donnie Pfaster bound them in front of her body and she needs to separate her hands if she’s going to hold onto him as tight as she wants to. 

He wants to touch her, and he makes it halfway there before chickening out and dropping his hand to the center console between them, where at least his pinky finger brushes against her bent knees. 

“It wasn’t just a holiday pleasantry, Scully.”

“It felt like it.”

“I…” he’s at a total loss.

“What if I wanted the world to end?” she asks, and his head snaps up so he can look in her eyes, which are wet and wide and desperate. “The world where you and I get closer and closer but _never_ kiss and work all these cases and _never_ fuck, and you get hurt and tell me you love me and then forget about it and we’re always fine and everything just stays the same, and we do it over and over and _over_ and _over_? I’m sick of that world, Mulder. I can’t stand it.” 

He sits stone still. She starts to cry, and covers her face with her hands.

“Are you leaving the X-Files?” he asks, which the absolute wrong question, if her sad, dry laugh tells him anything. 

“You’re such an _IDIOT_ ,” she says, taking a peek at him through her fingers, voice cracky and wet. Then she gets out the car and slams the door.

By the time he’s found the sense to follow her, she’s standing with her back to the road, arms crossed, looking out over a field of unidentifiable crop. Normally he would say something like _look at all that alfalfa, Scully_ , but he can’t bring himself to joke. Joking has already cost him the warm reception to his kiss that he had so hoped for. He is, he realizes when he hears her sniff, a huge idiot. 

He wants to wrap her in his arms, but she wouldn’t appreciate being taken by surprise, or being dominated physically while upset. 

She hears him coming. “You don’t have to say anything,” she tells him. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Yes you should have,” he says.

“I know nothing will change.”

“That’s not what I meant.” 

She’s doesn’t press on, but he does. “You want to fuck me?”

“That’s not what I meant,” she parrots, still defensive. 

He steps closer. Touches her arm. She finally looks at him. “Talk to me, Scully,” he whispers, hovering close. 

She ducks her head. “What did you mean?” she asks, and her voice is small. “Tell me what you meant.”

“I recognized you.” Eye contact again. “I kissed you and… and I don’t know why I chose to do it right then but I saw _you_ , after, your _face_ , it was… like you when we played baseball, or when you think I’m being funny, when I tease you, it was… it was a good face, Scully.”

He’s choked up, nervous as hell. He’s pleading his case and he needs her to believe him, this time above all other times. “I thought, _shit, it’s just the same us._ It’s me and it was you I was kissing and we’re still just the same, I was worried it would ruin—"

“You didn’t ruin anything,” she breathes.

“I just couldn’t believe it was us,” he tells her. “I didn’t realize it was us. And I didn’t realize I was…," he looks for the words, “… so afraid it wouldn’t be.”

What he means: _I was so afraid you would reject me. I was so afraid they would come and take you away from me on the spot. That would be the end of the world for me._

But it didn’t end. Because then she’s there, in his arms again, holding him tight on the edge of the highway, alfalfa blowing under the stars behind them. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the end :)


End file.
